Labyrinth Lake

Chapter Six

“For most of us, dreams come true only after they do not matter, Only in childhood do we ever have the chance of making dreams come true when they mean everything.”

-Anonymous

            Through the early years of their friendship, my sister and her friend showed me a camaraderie in which I would not become an active part.  It makes me so depressed to think of what I could have done to become a companion. 

            The neighborhood kids always played such fun games, usually right under our noses.  Hetal and Sabrina went out to enjoy themselves while I went purely to tag along as a younger sister does.  I only now regret not being nice to everyone.  My foul mouth would show itself whenever we played and would get me grounded and have me written off in my peer’s eyes before we even started school together. 

            I do have some fond memories of running through a neighbor’s sprinkler system with our clothes on, playing on backyard swings and forts, sledding down hill two-zees, playing barefoot soccer, and hide-and-go-seek tag or flashlight tag with the highest spirits.

            When I was about three years old, too young for school, my sister and her friend decided I was not too young for my first intimate kiss.  They knew of my small, secret crush on my next-door neighbor, a boy just my age.  We went into his garage and Hetal and Sabrina taught Arden and me what they called ‘the alphabet’.  It was an embarrassing trick to get Arden to kiss me, which involved steps to kissing labeled by letters of the alphabet.        “A: Arden, open your mouth.”

            “B: Come towards Galina.”

            They instructed us in three to four word sentences, one by one, until our mouths were touching.  I did not think he knew what we were doing until I told everyone in our fourth grade class that we kissed.  Everyone remembers the story of their first kiss.  It doesn’t matter if it was a good kiss; chances are it wasn’t.  But no matter how good or how lousy or who it was with, it will forever be stored in your memory right next to favorite television episodes.  My first kiss did not occur in the fifties like all of those innocent teen shows like Happy Days.  I was not a teenager or pre-teen, so I had not practiced on my hand like the girls in Grease made fun of Sandra D for doing.  It was mushy and wet and disgusting. 

When they did not believe me, I wanted to demonstrate, sort of.  I chased him around the classroom.

            “When we were younger, you liked me too.  Admit it Arden; admit it!”  I was declaring his feelings as if declaring my own, but the crush was gone for me then.

            That fiend made a laughing stock out of me in front of all twenty-two classmates, and after recess gossip, the whole school.

Arden declared, “I was stupid and didn’t know any better.” 

Even as humiliating as that was, it was still a victory for me.  It meant someone liked me more than someone liked just a friend.  At the time, I could not find very many to like me as a friend.

            We could have been great friends had I not yelled at them with words not very grown up for me, but so tainted that nobody should use them.  I was a poor loser at all games. However, Arden, my next-door neighbor, the first boy I ever kissed and the cutest boy you would ever meet always forgave me.

            Maybe I should not have tried to relive the past. I can just think of so many things to change whom I was that I might have made long lasting friends who would not turn on me.  When I get started thinking of the things I want to change, at one point, when I am on my last breathe, when I have thought of every possible thing to change about my personality, I start griping about the most trivial things that nobody would remember happened in elementary school except for parents.  I remember wearing pants or jeans every day and never changing my hair except putting a headband over it.  I was such a tomboy trying to be a girl.  I was so different and had I just changed that, I thought, I would have been accepted.  Nothing is ever that easily changed.  My